Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Syria, Intervention, and the UN

When the British parliament voted
earlier in the week on a preliminary motion supporting a military attack on
Syria, onlookers got a taste of what the decision of a country to go to war
would look like when that decision is made through some kind of a democratic
process.MPs inflicted a surprising
defeat on David Cameron’s government.Opponents of the war came not only from the opposition Labour Party, but
also in significant numbers from the Conservative Party’s ranks, and from its
coalition partner in government, the Liberal Democrats (the only party to
oppose the war on Iraq in 2003).

There has to this point been no such democratic
process in the United States, and the same President who regularly orders
extrajudicial killings (i.e. murders), who escalated the war in Afghanistan
without putting it to a vote, who bombed Libya without a vote, and who expanded
the U.S. War of Terror to Somalia, Yemen and beyond without a vote, now seems
to have been scared by Cameron’s experience (and perhaps by shifting public opinion)
into putting responsibility for the bombing of Syria at Congress’ door.

Of course, in the minds of the President
and his legal team, a bombing campaign in Syria would not be a war.Their tortured logic requires us to believe
that a war is only a “real war” if there are boots on the ground, and the
launching of missiles and dropping of bombs on people in another country is a
comparatively trivial matter, about which Congress and the public need not
worry their poor, overwrought little heads.

In fact, in the eyes of the Obama
administration, the United Nations need not worry either, and their war-making
would be oh-so much easier if the UN and its scientists and its democratic
process would just get out of the way and let the bombing begin.They have repeatedly said that the UN
investigation into the responsibility for the chemical attack in Syria is an
unnecessary sideshow, and have made it clear that in their minds the United
States has no reason to go through the process of securing a resolution at the
UN or of acceding to international law.

Frustration with the United Nations is
understandable, but it is a bit hypocritical of the United States to complain
so furiously.After all, the UN is no
more convoluted or slow-moving than the U.S. Senate.And it provides a good vehicle for gauging
how people in other countries will be affected by U.S. military interventions,
something which hindsight suggests might be an important consideration.The primary complaint about the UN process in
this particular interest is that U.S. jingoism will be checked by China and
Russia which have a history (not unlike the U.S.!) of backing up dictatorial,
violent regimes.

In my view, the U.S. and Britain should
begin making the case for themselves, as well as France, China, and Russia, to
give up their permanent membership and vetoes on the Security Council.As things stand, a handful of countries wield
too much power at the UN.Whether or not
the organisation can make itself more democratic, more relevant, less technocratic,
and more representative of the citizens of its constituent nations is hard to
say.But it is impossible to imagine
how, suborned as it so regularly is by the great power manoeuvrings of the U.S.
and its European lackeys on the one hand, and the sociopathic regimes in Moscow
and Beijing on the other, any of that can occur without those countries being
forced to yield up their veto powers.

One historian, Mark Mazower (No Enchanted Palace), has convincingly
demonstrated how the idealism of the UN was bent at its foundation into an
institutional and ideological form that actually mirrored the great power
politics of the day. At the end of the
day, if we can’t trust our fellow people in our fellow nations enough to stop clinging to an ossified political
structure based on the geopolitics and brinkmanship and world order of the
late-1940s and 1950s—an order which saw the defence of vicious European
empires, the expansion of U.S. militarism, and a series of cold wars which
proved all too devastatingly hot across Latin America, Africa, and Asia—then
it’s clearly time to close up the United Nations altogether, abandon the idea
of a shared human endeavour, and replace it with a concert of twenty-first
century Empires.

As the case of Syria shows, all of the
P5 governments are hungry for the ultimate great power status—protecting their
own government’s economic and security interests, which have precious little to
do with the good of their citizens.This
reality makes it difficult for their publics to accept their claims that they
have any interest in the welfare of Syrians being butchered in the country’s
civil war, knowing as they do of Russia’s economic and military interests in
the country and the history of U.S. interventions in the region.

If there is anything we can be sure of,
it is that intervention by the U.S. and France will achieve very little that is
good, and is much more likely to be motivated by a commitment to their War of
Terror or concerns about their own unsustainable national security commitments
than by any real sense of how to effectively bring succour to Syrian
citizens.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I work as an assistant professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research. This blog also appears on the website of the Redding Record Searchlight.